Quit Waving That Thing Around

Sunday, 2 August 2015

...would be better than whatever what we're upto now is, although it's a spicy proposition to get anything through the bugle on a schoolday these days. The moguls have iron elbows and scrutinise non-verbal expressions for whiffs of sass, which can result in any respectable clam-head you care to mention being trounced into the nudge-tunnel for the required probe into whether what their visible parts recently exuded was agonised wonder about how to galvanise a breakthrough in The Year of The Fist, or a deplorable lack of exuberance, both of which have near-identical appearances, and we find it best to find out as soon as possible which of these it might have been. We want big swigs of happiness during choppy times. We're only breaking ribs by accident.

Tuesday, 14 July 2015

A selection of cold slurpers and a device that drapes a fine frozen mist over my head and neck and someone playing the soothing end of the Nick Cave spectrum on a nearby marimba if at all possible buttercup, I said in sweltering German to a foamy-bearded waiter who'd come to repair my mojito. I didn't tell him that the largeness of the ice cubes had led to a horrifying inconsistency of temperature within the drink which jeopardised the entire 23 remaining hours of my holiday, because I didn't want to sound out of touch with world events.

Tuesday, 7 July 2015

Everywhere was hotter than everywhere else. The bar's walls were tiled up to head height with patterns like illustrations of non-existent plants. We sat on a hundred year-old couch drinking white russians. Murky declarations floated off the tongue of the man opposite, through the blob of smoke above the table and into our perspiring ears. The Cunt has removed democracy in Europe, Berlin is dead, I have to say this quietly or my listening countrymen will have me crucified. He described what things were like and we described how they seem now. We asked about the tiles, he said the place used to be a classy something or other, before the tiles were covered up, abandoned, then rediscovered and polished when this place opened, the last proper old new bar in poor old dead new Berlin, soon to be devoured by the unstoppable crushing jaws The Cunt calls prosperity.

Monday, 22 June 2015

The new exciting lunch facility is worth a visit mate yeah. At the entrance you're given a disposable tunic. At the exit you're hosed down and congratulated by a woman with a tattoo of a pricey cupcake somewhere on one of her legs. Before the exit you sit at a picnic table, attacking strips of gifted carcass with your hands and teeth, euphoric slop squirting down your neck and wrists, thinking about Europe.

Sunday, 14 June 2015

My appearance at the lung-judging festival was a year overdue. I knew this from the notes on the bottom of my repeat prescriptions, which had said bold and ineffective things, involving the words "must" and "essential", the last few times I'd collected my medicine from the chemist. I'd correctly assumed that the doctor wouldn't refuse to give me any, but hadn't thought the nurse would leave a voicemail full of antiseptic concern. We need to measure the capacity of your pipes. Your graph is full of gaps. Help us. Help us. But the last two times I'd done this I'd had index fingers wagged at my eyes, because I'd told them about how I inhale the fumes of burning money. And I find being judged to be a waste of my time. So I went with reluctance. But there were no fingers, I was surprised, just a flat statement of the capacity, four or five hundred lung-units, and I was weighed and measured, and found to be seventy or eighty of one thing, and a hundred and something of something else.

Thursday, 4 June 2015

I combed my brain to get out the crumbs and see what they all added up to. I sent the unnecessary cake away to be assessed, hoping its irregular texture might mean it's tremendous.I watched a spider disappear into the new Thee Oh Sees album.I read R. Adler's account of her experience of reading a P. Kael book and began to think I should think more about what I'm doing with all these words.My role at work changed and now instead of putting people in rooms I put numbers in boxes. The boxes change colour when they're satisfied.
Barbaric fluctuations in the thickness of the five-pence piece cause frowns above the coin tray.

Friday, 8 May 2015

I'm defending the house against furniture. The place I once ordered some from now seems to think I won't last a week without buying some more. Like it's bread. To entice me into another purchase of a lifetime they send me pictures of rooms it looks like no-one lives in. Small fluorescent paragraphs outline the tragedies associated with failure to spend. I didn't buy this sturdy and fragrant end table and now I have tuberculosis. / There's nothing made of oak in my kitchen, I have completely lost my mind.

WRITTEN ELSEWHERE

Book

I WROTE A TINY BOOK. PEOPLE SAID: "His ear for dialogue is incredibly acute" AND "...he conjures picture perfect scenes from almost nothing" AND "...coming in at all the new angles, flying under the radar with his underdog wings" AND HOLY FUCK IT'S FOR SALE